Month / March 2013

The New York Times: Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine, according to IDC.

Update 2013.03.30: This, as well as many others, was in response to Frank X. Shaw’s post on The Official Microsoft Blog taking a potshot at Blackberry and Apple:

Windows Phone has reached 10 percent market share in a number of countries, and according to IDCâ€™s latest report, has shipped more than Blackberry in 26 markets and more than iPhone in seven.

Six of the seven countries where Windows Phone shipped more than iPhone were mentioned above. The 7th ‘country’ is the “rest of central and eastern Europe” including Croatia. South Africa, Ukraine, and the 7th country each represent less than 100,000 Windows Phone import units in Q4’12. That’s not a lot.

Windows Phone is impressive considering it was designed from the ground up by Microsoft, but for Shaw to brag about something that’s really about nothing is grasping at straws. Admit growth has been underwhelming and a lot of work still needs to be done. We don’t respond well to unfound boasting, but we do respond well to honesty.

*Selling: The official number of imports into the country. Who knows how many are actually sold to end users.

TouchWiz has become a bit more consistent with the latest upgrade. There are no more jarring mismatches in different parts of the OS, and it’s been lightened up a bit and has a clean “flat” feel. Unfortunately, it feels like it has been sent a few years back in time to the Froyo days. Say goodbye to all of the nice touch-friendly ViewPagers and say hello again to a fully tabbed UI. You’ll also enjoy the seemingly endless onslaught of popup windows and modal “Loading…” dialogs. UI performance is average. It’s better and worse at the same time, depending on your viewpoint I suppose.

[…] the 15-inch, 1080p IPS touchscreen display might be the best on a consumer-grade HP laptop yet. Itâ€™s exceptionally crisp and colorful â€” this Oblivion movie trailer looks positively fantastic in 1080p â€” and it has nice wide viewing angles too. Still, it canâ€™t stand with the very best weâ€™ve seen, like the Chromebook Pixel, the Zenbook Prime, and the Macbook Pro with Retina Display. For one thing, it doesnâ€™t get nearly as bright as some of its competition: I had to set brightness to 80 percent to use the XT TouchSmart comfortably in a dark room.

The HP Envy Spectre XT TouchSmart seems to sport a very good display, but could use a little more oomph from the backlight.

Late last week, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates introduced new state legislation that would effectively ban Google Glass usage while driving. As far as we know, if West Virginia’s bill were to pass, it would be the first bill in the country to address Google Glass and similar devices.

I think Google Glass could be a better GPS navigation device than what we have now. With Google Glass our eyes move much less to check where we are and where we are headed compared to smartphones, traditional navigation devices, or even built-in navigation displays in our cars. Instead of attempting to ban Google Glass, the goal should be to limit distractions when driving. In the case of Google Glass a “Drive Mode” could be initiated to limit certain features while allowing the driver to benefit from an enhanced navigation experience.